AG Jeff Landry calls transgender bathroom mandate unlawful

BATON ROUGE - Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry says he’ll “vigorously defend” the state and its citizens against what he calls threats brought about by the Obama administration’s recent mandate that public schools allow students to use bathroom and locker rooms of the opposite sex.

On Wednesday, Landry issued a letter about the issue to leaders of several state education boards. In the letter, the Attorney General asserts that the Obama administration’s threat to remove Louisiana Title IX monies if the mandate isn’t carried out “jeopardizes the safety of the student body and creates a public education funding crisis.”

“Let me perfectly clear: President Obama and his appointees do not have legal authority to require our children to share locker rooms and bathrooms with children of the opposite sex,” wrote Attorney General Jeff Landry. “The Administration’s interpretation of Title IX constitutes an improper attempt to commandeer State-owned property in pursuit of a federal policy that has uniformly been rejected by the federal courts.”

Landry goes on tol say the administration is irresponsible in creating an environment in which children could more easily fall prey to sexual predators.

“Furthermore, these irresponsible and illegally promulgated rules place the mental well-being and privacy rights of ninety-nine percent of Louisiana’s children at risk without any demonstrable evidence of benefit to the less than one percent of the population this policy purports to benefit,” Landry wrote.